Beyond a tragic fire season: a window of opportunity to address climate change?

Baldwin, Claudia; Ross, Helen

doi:10.1080/14486563.2020.1730572

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Terrestrial biomes are a representation from [56]. The "Black Summer" wildfire season was exceptional in terms of area burnt and wildfire severity [58][59][60][61]. These mega wildfires had a devastating and direct impact on the ecosystems, humans, and economy.…”

Section: Table 1 Characteristics Of the Five Wildfires That Were Anal...mentioning

confidence: 99%

RADAR-Vegetation Structural Perpendicular Index (R-VSPI) for the Quantification of Wildfire Impact and Post-Fire Vegetation Recovery

et al. 2022

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The precise information on fuel characteristics is essential for wildfire modelling and management. Satellite remote sensing can provide accurate and timely measurements of fuel characteristics. However, current estimates of fuel load changes from optical remote sensing are obstructed by seasonal cloud cover that limits their continuous assessments. This study utilises remotely sensed Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) (Sentinel-1 backscatter) data as an alternative to optical-based imaging (Sentinel-2 scaled surface reflectance). SAR can penetrate clouds and offers high-spatial and medium-temporal resolution datasets and can hence complement the optical dataset. Inspired by the optical-based Vegetation Structural Perpendicular Index (VSPI), an SAR-based index termed RADAR-VSPI (R-VSPI) is introduced in this study. R-VSPI characterises the spatio-temporal changes in fuel load due to wildfire and the subsequent vegetation recovery thereof. The R-VSPI utilises SAR backscatter (σ°) from the co-polarized (VV) and cross-polarized (VH) channels at a centre frequency of 5.4 GHz. The newly developed index is applied over major wildfire events that occurred during the “Black Summer” wildfire season (2019–2020) in southern Australia. The condition of the fuel load was mapped every 5 (any orbit) to 12 (same orbit) days at an aggregated spatial resolution of 110 m. The results show that R-VSPI was able to quantify fuel depletion by wildfire (relative to healthy vegetation) and monitor its subsequent post-fire recovery. The information on fuel condition and heterogeneity improved at high-resolution by adapting the VSPI on a dual-polarization SAR dataset (R-VSPI) compared to the historic forest fuel characterisation methods (that used visible and infrared bands only for fuel estimations). The R-VSPI thus provides a complementary source of information on fuel load changes in a forest landscape compared to the optical-based VSPI, in particular when optical observations are not available due to cloud cover.

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Section: Table 1 Characteristics Of the Five Wildfires That Were Anal...mentioning

confidence: 99%

RADAR-Vegetation Structural Perpendicular Index (R-VSPI) for the Quantification of Wildfire Impact and Post-Fire Vegetation Recovery

et al. 2022

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“…Many have sufficiently pointed out that the bushfires in Australia and elsewhere could have been anticipated, not just because of the drought, but more importantly, by the impacts of human-induced climate change. In this regard, the bushfires were not a sudden, extraordinary crisis, but a symptom of a longer term, more slow-burn crisis: what is now often called the 'climate crisis' (Baldwin and Ross 2020). The Black Lives Matter protests, while instantiated by the immediate outrage of Floyd's murder, were clearly intensified by the structural anti-black racism that has characterized US society for decades, if not centuries.…”

Section: Crisis What Crisis?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the crisis: transitioning to a better world?

Ang

2021

Cultural Studies

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The COVID-19 crisis of 2020 is not just a short-term public health emergency. Instead, it has laid bare a broader and deeper organic crisis, produced by the intrinsic tensions and contradictions of the hegemonic neoliberal capitalist order. I discuss this organic crisis in terms of its active amplification of human divisiveness at various levelsclass, racial, national, culturalwhich impedes the generation of solidarity and cooperation in the name of a 'common humanity', required if humans are to live in harmony among each other and with the planet. By reflecting on a diverse range of barriers to such a desirable future, from the erosive role of human passions to the escalating new cold war between China and the West and the fundamental divisions exposed by the existential challenge of climate change, I argue that to have a chance of a liveable and equitable common future, we need to maintain a critical cosmopolitan horizon against the grain of self-interested closures and exclusions which underpin the organic crisis.KEYWORDS Organic crisis; neoliberalism; inequality; racism; climate change; cosmopolitanism 2020 was dominated by the Covid-19 crisis, an infectious disease pandemic caused by a coronavirus which was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has since spread throughout the world, killing almost two million people worldwide by the end of the year. However, the year also saw multiple other crises. In Australia, for example, from where I write this essay, the year began with unprecedented bushfires brought about by record-breaking temperatures and months of severe drought, burning down more than 18 million hectares of bush, forest and parks across the country, killing dozens of people and destroying thousands of dwellings and townships. In the United States, similar unprecedented fires also raged for weeks in the summer across the West Coast. A few months earlier, a crisis situation emerged with the eruption of the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd, an African American man who lost his life after a white police officer violently knelt on his neck for eight minutes, preventing him to breathe. The movement quickly spread the world over, inspiring many subaltern racialized groups to protest against

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“…[30] The UN Environment Programme "reported 400 megatonneso fC O 2 emissions, equivalent to Australia's typical annualemissions in just three months." [31] Ap reviously unknown virus, SARS-CoV-2, locked down most of the Northern Hemisphere, decreasing some of 2020's greenhouse gas emissions comparedt op receding years. [32] However, because CO 2 accumulates in the atmosphere CO 2 levels still reached arecord high this year.…”

Section: Back To the Future:know Thyselfmentioning

confidence: 99%